Patronising women voters

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The Liberal Party should not be surprised that "doctors' wives" are turning against it, writes Judith Brett.

The phenomenon of the so-called "doctors' wives" who are troubling Liberal Party pollsters was discussed by Max Suich on this page last Friday. The phrase refers to middle class women married to high-income men who are thinking of voting Green or even Labor because they don't agree with the Howard Government taking Australia into the Iraq war, or are upset by the treatment of asylum seekers, or are angry about the continued logging of old-growth forests.

They are found in most electorates, particularly the well-heeled ones, and the trouble for the Liberal Party is that its various blandishments are not working on them.

Max Suich invited responses as to the source of the term. Of that I am not sure, but I can enlighten him as to the source of the phenomenon.

The Liberal Party has always claimed that it is the party of those who put national interest above self-interest, in contrast to the selfish sectional appeals of Labor. It has claimed that people support it on the basis of their principles and values rather than their crude material interests. And it has, of course, always balanced these claims with well-targeted appeals to sectional interests. This, after all, is electoral politics.

Representing itself as the party of the principled and morally concerned, the Liberal Party was - at least until the 1960s - the natural home of the morally concerned woman voter. Women have always been more sensitive than men to the moral dimensions of politics.

They first left their homes to enter public politics in large numbers in the 19th century to support moral causes such as temperance and the abolition of slavery. Having developed a specialisation in moral knowledge and experience in the private sphere of the home, they saw it as their public duty to try to raise the moral character of the nation.

"How intimate is the moral character that exists between the women of England and the moral character of this country in the scale of nations," wrote one popular woman author in the 1840s. And when women finally won the right to vote, they were far more likely to understand this in terms of their duties and obligations than claims and entitlements. It provided the opportunity to give political service, rather than to pursue self-interested claims.

In fact it was fear of the moral power of women voters, in particular their opposition to the male pleasures of drinking and gambling, that motivated much of the opposition to the female franchise.

Therefore, the so-called doctors' wives - women who put moral values before self-interest - are not new. They are simply continuing a long tradition of women's political engagement.

Until feminism and the 1970s, the Liberal Party was the natural home of the morally concerned woman looking to cast her vote in the national interest. Moreover, middle class women have always preferred consensual politics to divisive conflict, and there was little to attract them in Labor's masculinist political style.

Feminism of course changed much of this and when, in 1972, the Women's Electoral Lobby found that Labor under Whitlam was more progressive on women's issues than the Liberals, the balance shifted.

Labor began to poll better among women than the Liberals, and middle class women were recruited to Labor's social democratic wing. Some of this was feminist self-interest and some was the attraction of Labor's social democratic vision of the national interest.

Many women of course stayed with the Liberals, because they believed in its view of the national interest.

In this election campaign it is hard for people wanting to cast their vote on the basis of their view of the national interest rather than their self-interest to find arguments about the national interest from either party.

Both Labor and the Liberals are engaging in well-targeted vote buying, appealing to the self-interest of particular groups. The debate revolves around who will be better off and by how many dollars.

It is not surprising that the Liberals are finding concerned women across all age groups in many Liberal electorates thinking about changing their vote. What is surprising is that they know so little of their own history that they are surprised by these women's reaction. Did they really think that it was only leftie, pinko inner-city latte drinkers who opposed the war in Iraq, or were ashamed of Australia's treatment of asylum seekers?

That Liberals would even use a term such as "doctors' wives" to describe morally motivated, well-educated middle class women shows the depth of their conviction that self-interest is the main political motivator, that no matter what they say about values, politics is really about class and these women are too woolly-minded to realise it.

As well, the term is extraordinarily patronising, assuming that women should vote according to their husbands' economic interests, that they are someone's wife rather than a citizen in their own right. And further, it is implied that when they don't vote according to their husband's economic interests they are somehow making an inauthentic political choice.

But perhaps these women have jobs of their own - as teachers, accountants, doctors even. And perhaps they think that politics is about more than economics, that moral choices are real choices even if they don't carry immediate monetary costs.

What this term describes - women's morally motivated political engagement - has a long and proud history. How it is described - in a dismissive and insulting epithet - also has a long history in men's attempts to patronise and diminish women's political voice.

Judith Brett teaches politics at La Trobe University and is the author of Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class (Cambridge University Press, 2003).